The Woman in Cabin 10(60)
“No, I won’t have champagne,” he said in answer to Hanni gliding up with a tray. “I’ll have a Scotch.”
Hanni nodded and hurried away, and Cole sat back in his chair and passed a hand over his unshaven face.
“Sorry about your camera,” I said cautiously. He scowled, and I saw that he was very drunk already.
“It’s a f*cking nightmare,” he said. “And the worst of it is, it’s my own bloody fault. I should have backed it up.”
“Are all the shots gone?” I asked. Cole shrugged.
“No idea, but probably, yes. Got a guy back in London who might be able to get some of the data off, but it’s showing f*ck all when I put it in my computer, it’s not even reading the card.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said. My heart was beating fast. I wasn’t sure if this was sensible, but I figured I had nothing to lose now. “Was it just stuff from the voyage? I thought I saw one shot from somewhere else . . . ?”
“Oh, yeah, I was swapping the cards over, it had a few shots from a shoot I did a couple of weeks back at the Magellan.”
I knew the Magellan—it was a very exclusive all-male members club in Piccadilly, founded as a meeting place for diplomats and what the club described as “gentlemen travelers.” No women were allowed as members, but female guests were permitted, and I had attended functions there once or twice in Rowan’s stead.
“Are you a member?” I asked. He gave a snort.
“Not bloody likely. Not my style, even if they’d let me in, which is doubtful. Too crusty for my taste—anywhere that won’t let you wear jeans isn’t for me. The Frontline is more my cup of tea. Alexander’s a member, though. So is Bullmer, I think. You know the drill, you have to be either too posh to function or rich as shit, and fortunately I’m not either.”
His last remark fell into a lull in conversation from the rest of the table, the words painfully loud and noticeably slurred in the silence, and I saw a few heads turn, and Anne glance at the steward with a nod that I interpreted as Get his food over there before the whiskey.
“What were you doing there, then?” I said, keeping my voice low, as if I could persuade him to moderate his tone by osmosis.
“Pictures for Harper’s.” His plate arrived and he began spearing foodstuffs at random, shoving the fragile architectural morsels into his mouth seemingly without even tasting them. “Some launch, I think. Can’t remember. Christ.” He looked down at his hand, the fork awkwardly balanced against the bandage. “This is sodding painful. There’s no way I’m trailing round Trondheim cathedral tomorrow, I’m going to the doctor to get this checked out and get some decent painkillers.”
After dinner finished, we took our coffee through to the lounge, and I found myself standing next to Owen White, both of us staring out the long window, into the fog. He nodded politely but seemed in no hurry to open the conversation. I tried to think what Rowan would do. Charm him? Or brush him off and go and talk to someone of more immediate use to Velocity? Archer, perhaps?
I glanced over my shoulder at Archer and saw that he was very, very drunk and had pinned Hanni into a corner of the room, her back to the window, his broad frame effectively blocking her exit. Hanni was holding a jug of coffee in one hand and was smiling politely but with a trace of wariness. She said something and gestured to the coffeepot, obviously as a way of taking her leave, but he laughed and put one heavy arm around her shoulders in a gesture of avuncular possession that made my flesh creep a little.
Hanni said something else that I didn’t catch, and then slipped out from under his grip with what looked like practiced dexterity. For a moment Archer’s face looked a mixture of foolishness and fury, but then he seemed to shrug it off and moved across to talk to Ben.
I turned back to Owen White with a sigh, though I was not sure whether it was a sigh of relief for Hanni, or resignation at my own reluctance to deal with unpleasant people, even for the sake of my career.
Owen, by contrast, seemed reassuringly harmless, though I realized, as I looked covertly at his profile in the reflection of the darkened, foggy window, that I had no real idea whether he would be of use to Velocity or not. Ben had said he was an investor, but White had kept himself to himself so much this voyage that I had no clear impression of what he actually did. Perhaps he would be the perfect angel investor for the group, if Velocity’s owner ever decided to go into some more profitable area. In any case, I had no desire to go across to the other side of the room.
“So, um,” I began awkwardly, “I feel slightly like we haven’t been properly introduced. My name is Laura Blacklock. I’m a travel journalist.”
“Owen White,” he said simply, but there was no sense of dismissal in his tone, I got the impression that he was just a man of few words. He held out his hand, and I shook it clumsily with my left, which was holding a petit four, but seemed better than my right, which was holding a hot cup of coffee.
“So what brings you to the Aurora, Mr. White?”
“I work for an investment group,” he said, and took a long sip of his coffee. “Bullmer was, I think, hoping I’d recommend the Aurora as an investment opportunity.”
“But . . . from what you were saying to Tina, that won’t be the case?” I said cautiously, wondering if it was bad manners to admit overhearing, though I could hardly have helped it. He nodded, not seeming offended.